Welcome to Harvard Boas Scholars

History, Purpose and Background

The Harvard Boas Scholarships, which have been in existence for 50 years, are aimed to support bright and ambitious minds who seek to pursue their education at Harvard. These generous scholarships reward outstanding candidates who demonstrate, beyond academic excellence, a strong interest for cultural exchange and ambassadorial qualities. They provide financial support to scholars who have the ambition to build upon their research and education to improve society and humanity.

The Frank Boas Scholarships support people who seek to further their education and/or research at Harvard. The Frank Boas Scholarship for Graduate Study can both serve for graduate level education and for post-doctoral research at Harvard. The Frank Boas Scholarship in International Legal Studies is specifically connected to the LLM-program at Harvard Law School. As a rule, both scholarships are all-in, covering tuition and all expenses for one academic year at Harvard.
Throughout their existence, the Frank Boas Scholarships have aimed to open Harvard’s resources and the world to very talented scholars in a variety of disciplines. The programs not only aim at fostering excellence and advancing science through the best and the brightest, but also seek to support the grantees’ ambitions to improve society and humanity with their research and education. As an instrument for educational and research exchange, the Frank Boas Scholarships support the growing family of Boas scholars who have gone to Harvard in pursuit of passions and dreams that can make a difference in our increasingly international world.

Frank Boas

In 1964, Mr.and Mrs. Maurits C. Boas, who had come to the United States from the Netherlands in 1940, endowed a generous and unprecedented scholarship program at Harvard University for the benefit of young scholars from Belgium and Luxembourg: the Frank Boas Scholarship for Graduate Study at Harvard. Together with a travel grant from the Commission for Educational Exchange (the Fulbright Commission) in Brussels, this scholarship provides both a full year of graduate study at Harvard and an opportunity for travel in the United States. Two years later, Mr. and Mrs. Boas established an equally generous scholarship for graduate study at Harvard Law School, open to candidates recommended by the Fulbright Commissions in Austria, Denmark, Iceland, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and Sweden, as well as Belgium and Luxembourg: the Frank Boas Scholarship for International Legal Studies at the Harvard Law School . Mr. and Mrs. Boas were inspired to create the Boas scholarship programs as a result of the experience of their son, Frank Boas, a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, who served for many years on the Commission for Educational Exchange between the United States, Belgium and Luxembourg. Frank’s parents wanted talented scholars from Western Europe to have the same educational opportunities in the United States as their son, and were keenly aware of the need to provide financial resources to make this possible.